[simias]

I took it the other way around: it's easy to memorize "went" because you use it all the time. If on the other hand a much less common verb like "to satiate" had a very irregular conjugation then it would regularize pretty quickly because nobody but ultra-pedants would bother to remember the exception.

I think a decent real example of that is fiancé/fiancée, those are french borrowings and have, at least originally, kept the French grammatical gender inflection. However nowadays I often see people using either spelling in a gender-neutral way since most people don't bother to learn French grammar for this one word.

[coldtea]

>I took it the other way around: it's easy to memorize "went" because you use it all the time.

That still wouldn't explain the why of having it like "went" vs "goed".

Sure, it's easy to memorize because we use it all the time, but why have it to memorize it in the first place, versus something like "goed".

So, this theory (I tried to convey above) said that it being irregular placed ensured we don't slow down try to derive it from regular rules, but instead have fast access to a memorized form.

Couldn't we just memorize "goed"? If it's just "frequency of use" that mattered, "went" and "goed" would work just as well.

But the extra idea is that "goed", being regular, would be too easy for us to confuse with thousand of other regular verbs, and not use our "fast recall" mechanism, regardless of that verb being needed all the time.

Not sure if correct - read it years ago. This seems to be related to that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_and_irregular_verbs#Li...

[simias]

Your point is interesting but I think you're falling for the same type of fallacies people often have regarding evolution (if you keep going into water for a long time over many generations you'll eventually grow gills!).

Natural languages are not designed, they evolve. The irregular nature of the conjugation of "to go" might just be a remnant of some archaic form and nothing else, in the same way some argue that the plural of "octopus" is "octopi" or "octopodes. Does it serve any linguistic purpose? I don't see how, but it won't stop some people for saying it. Look at the use of the subjunctive in "if I were you", which is one of the only occurrences of the subjunctive outside of set-phrases in day-to-day modern English. Is it really necessary? If one was to say "if I was you" would it lose some additional nuance or meaning in practice?

I often see people trying to rationalize some language features (such as arbitrary genders of nouns in many languages) as error correction or some "optimization" but I'm generally unconvinced. Maybe "I went" is just the linguistic equivalent of a platypus, some weird byproduct of a very long evolution with no other intrinsic purpose in the grand scheme of things.

[coldtea]

>Natural languages are not designed, they evolve.

But that's part of my point. I don't say irregular verbs were designed to be effective that way, but that they were evolved to be effective.

Hence the link with "language acquisition" being involved -- when regular and irregular verbs developed that wasn't a known theory some "language designer" could consciously follow. Just something innate that could develop because of a evolutionary advantage.

In fact, if someone merely designed, they'd probably go for all regular, rather than regular + irregular, as it's "cleaner".

>I often see people trying to rationalize some language features (such as arbitrary genders of nouns in many languages) as error correction or some "optimization" but I'm generally unconvinced.

Tons of language features are indeed optimizations for different things. Cold climates for example have languages with less vowels (keeping your mouth closed more).